Dog Day Afternoon - AQ3D Style

OK, it was Dog Day Morning for me but that doesn't quite have the same ring to it. And anyway, it was actually last night when I spotted that AdventureQuest 3D was celebrating something called Dog Day.

My reaction to the news was mixed. I was happy to find out there was such a thing as Dog Day but also uncomfortably aware I was going to have to do something about it. I mean, I covered Cat Day when they ran an event for that. Beryl would never forgive me if I did any less for dogs.

The problem is, I don't really play AQ3D. I haven't even been logging in to open the free daily loot chests for weeks. I was saving up the cash shop currency you get for doing that so I could buy something nice for the house I never visit but then I spent it all on my spiffy new catsuit (Which looks great, by the way.) and that pretty much killed my motivation to carry on.

Since I'd spent almost all my magic money, and assuming the dog event was likely to run along very similar lines to the one for cats, I didn't think there'd be much chance of my getting a full set of dog cosplay gear but I thought maybe there'd be something I could afford with whatever change I had left from last time. Anyway, I knew I had to write about the damn thing so after we got back from walking Beryl and feeding the crows this morning, I logged into the game to see what my options might be. 

Better than I expected, as it turned out. 

I know it's unlikely anyone who's going to read this will be thinking of doing the event so there's no point going into a whole lot of detail about how the event works. It is indeed basically the same as the cat one, as expected, anyway.

There's a boss fight which no-one ever seems to be doing when I log in. The new dog boss stands right next to the old cat boss because both events are running simultaneously. I was half hoping the Vicious Cat and the Big Dog (Those are their boss names. Scaary!) would start scrapping with each other but no such luck.

There's a selection of dog-themed onesies, hoods and tails on both the pet vendor and on Not Alma, who has now added Dog? to her species subscript alongside Cat? just to make her even weirder than usual. All of those were well out of my price range considering that, after my cataclysmic spending spree I only had just over a hundred Dragon Crystals left.

Luckily, before logging in, I had taken the trouble to read the notes for the event and I remembered seeing something about house items. A flip through the various tabs showed me several of those, including a kennel, a feeding bowl and several dogs, all dozing in convincingly doglike poses.

None of them were very expensive but they were on sale for a variety of currencies, some of which I had, some I didn't. I had the right ones for the dog sleeping on her back and for a feeding bowl so I bought those. I also checked the cat tab and bought a sleeping black cat as well. If my new dog is going to be home alone, she's going to want someone to play with and I am very much Team Cat and Dog these days..

On that note, one new addition that came with dog day is a voting booth where you can vote for your preferred pet - Dog or Cat. The rubric explains, somewhat unecessarily I felt, that the vote is confidential and all in fun. I'm not sure how it could have been otherwise, although I suppose some kind of  flag could have appeared over your head as you cast your vote. It's happened before. Remember Evon vs Kiel?

I dithered for a while over which way to vote. Until we got Beryl I wouldn't have given it a second's thought. I was Team Cat for more than sixty years. Now, though... In the end I opted not to vote at all, which makes something of a mockery of the Just For Fun theory. I might be taking all of this a little too seriously but then I get like that with votes in video games. Real life voting is so much more straightforward.

After that, I thought about logging out. I'd done my duty to dogdom and I had enough for the post. I had a feeling there was more, though, so I looked around and found Aria the Pet Shop owner had a quest marker up.

Again, to save time I won't go through the details. The important part is that there's a quest to get a pet dog called Klaus. Pretty sure he's a German Shepherd. The quest is a six-parter, which honestly is really short for this game. Aria has another non-event quest to get a dog called Fluffy that has thirty-five stages (!)

Klaus's quest looks easy as well as short so I'm hoping to find time to finish it. It would have been nice to have done it in time for this post but we can't always get what we want.

Other than that, I think I'm probably done with both cats and dogs in AQ3D for now. It's a very time-consuming game and I'm trying not to get sucked into any of its many time-sinks. On the other hand, there is also a bonus XP event going on right now as well and I did ding doing quests for Aria this morning...

And this is how they suck you in!

All In A Good Cauzzzz...

I don't have time for a proper post today but I'd like to get something out there. So, who fancies a quiz about bees?

Gamigo, apparently. According to them, it's World Bee Day and in honor of the event there's a competition in Rift, for which you have to answer fourteen questions about bees!

Why fourteen? Don't ask me! 

What do bees have to do with Rift? Don't ask me that either!

Also, when I say "in Rift", what I really mean is in Microsoft Forms, which is where the link from the Steam page takes you. 

And when I say "answer", of course I mean "Highlight, right-click and select "Search Google", which is what everyone is going to do, although having done it myself, I have to say it doesn't one hundred per cent work for every question.

And finally, when I say "It's World Bee Day", what I mean is it was World Bee Day on Monday. I didn't notice the event was on until tonight.

If you want to try it for yourself you can find all the details including the link on the Rift Steam Community page, where you can win 3000 credits to spend in the Rift Cash Shop, always assuming you a) have a character in Rift and b) are one of the three lucky winners.

Or you can just do it all for fun right here!

1.How many different species of bees are there?

2.How much honey can a single honey bee make in its lifetime?

3.What do bees collect from flowers?

4.How many pairs of wings does a bee have?

5.What color can bees NOT see?

6.Which common insect eats bees?

7.How many eyes does a bee have?

8.How many honey bees can you find in a hive?

9.Who are the members of the honey bee colony?

10.Which of these foods are pollinated by bees?

11.What is the dance called that honeybees use as communication?

12.How wide is the largest bee’s wingpsan?

13.Which family is the honey bee a part of?

14.What is royal jelly?

The actual quiz is multiple choice but really, where's the skill in that? You're just going to Google the answers like I did, anyway. And you're going to have to because I'm not telling you!

At least now no-one can say Gamigo aren't doing their best to keep Rift buzzing!

In My Experience... : EQ2

I was happily sorting my bags in EverQuest 2 yesterday (three hours and the job barely started) when I happened to spot someone in chat talking about double XP. I hadn't heard anything about it but I moused over my xp bar and sure enough, there it was: Server Bonus 100%.

Well, I say moused over but it wasn't quite that simple. These days, EQ2 XP comes in (at least) five flavors: Adventure, Tradeskill, Alternative Advancement, Tithe and Ascension. When you're leveling up, the default is Adventure but at max level that swaps to Ascension, since the entire endgame is now balanced around those four classes. What happens when you max that out I don't know - and I'm a long way from finding out.

When I heard about the possible bonus XP, I was playing my max-level Berserker, so the bar in front of me showed Ascension, which is unaffected by bonuses. It didn't used to be, at least I don't think it did, but one of the unheralded changes that came in with the Chaos Descending expansion was a complete revamp of the way Ascension works.

Someone doesn't get out much.

All four Ascension classes received five more levels; that was advertised. The old "Ascension Vitality" mechanic, which limited the amount you could earn per day and involved a complicated and annoying process of visiting NPCs to top it up, was removed; that wasn't mentioned anywhere I saw. Also, all Ascension XP earned by killing mobs vanished, too.

The only way to level Ascension classes now is by completing quests or using specific items, mostly those granted by quests. Quest XP goes directly to Ascension. Sometimes you might get an item that gives a whole Ascension Level or even several. I haven't had one in the new expansion zones yet but as far as I know, they're still attached to the quests that used to give them in Planes of Prophecy and in panda Yun Zi's catch-up questline.

That reminded me of something Wilhelm said about Lord of the Rings Online:

"I remember back when LOTRO was working up towards launch that the idea of quest experience being so heavily weighted on your progression path as somewhat controversial. Of course, any minor change of formula can be said to have been controversial to some degree. Still, we went from EverQuest, which was “Quest experience? You have to have quests for that!” to WoW, where killing the mobs tended to be, on balance, worth as much as the quests themselves, to LOTRO, which pretty much required that you do the quests to level up."

For a long time after that EQ2 offered a meaningful choice between grinding mobs and questing but the current orthodoxy is squarely in favor of quests. In fact, in a year when the expansion cycle doesn't include a level cap increase, XP, however acquired, can begin to seem a tad irrelevant to most of the installed customer base, which does make you wonder just who Bonus XP events could be aimed at. Perhaps that's why no-one bothered to tell us about this one. 

It did get me thinking, though. The change in the way XP gets handed out at higher levels is a reflection of the degree to which the last ten levels, including the solo "casual" version, are now both separate and different from how everything works for the first hundred. It's much more than just the XP, too; from 100 onwards you might as well be playing a different game entirely.

For a hundred levels you really can just wander around, wearing whatever gear you happen to find, killing whichever mobs you chance to run into, doing quests for anyone with a feather over their head. Yes, there are optimum paths and yes, if you stick with the game long-term, you'll have to backtrack to fill out the significant parts you ignored, but if your goal is simply to entertain yourself and get to three figures then you don't need much of a plan - or a clue.

Kill named mobs for fun and profit and, if you have the Weekly, XP.

From 100 onwards, though, you need to pay increasingly close attention to any number of abstruse and often unfamiliar systems. Even that most basic of constants, Adventure XP, changes radically, and not just as outlined above.

In order to make sure players spent time on the newest content, thereby concentrating populations in a small number of zones, the amount of XP required for each level was increased by orders of magnitude. You can still do older content if you insist but it won't do you any good at all, even if you mentor down for it. You will still get XP but it will be infinitesimal compared to what you need.

Going from Level 99 to Level 100 takes 1.66m xp, up from 1.5m the level before. Getting from 100 to 101 requires 140m. You can see that grinding in Sebilis isn't going to make much of a dent in that.

Killing mobs in current content gives more XP than killing mobs in older contet but not by all that much. It won't begin to make a dent in what you're being asked to earn. If you want to level from 100 to 110 you have to do quests in the latest level-appropriate zones, which means no later than last year's expansion. A single quest there will give you a decent chunk of the level: with full vitality and a server bonus you might get half-way from one level to the next on a single hand-in.

The alternative to grinding levels used to be grinding AAs. It's not called Alternative Advancement for nothing. AAs, aren't what they were. They stop at 350 and by the time most people hit max level they'll already have capped out. AAs are still essential, especially if you spend them correctly, but once you've got them and set them you can forget them.

Gratuitous picture of a snail. In no way intended to symbolize leveling speed.

The attention that used to go to AAs has, for a couple of years now, been replaced by the focus on Ascension. Ascended skills are extremely powerful. Among other things, they deliver nukes and dots that visibly impact the health of Level 118 named mobs, which your class skills definitely won't.

I am only just beginning to get a clear idea of how important Ascension is. I can see now why committed veterans have been grumbling about everyone turnng into Wizards. On the plus side, it certainly must make the small EQ2 dev team's job a lot easier; balancing four Ascension classes has to be a lot more manageable than balancing the full twenty-six.

Once you have your levels and your AAs you have to think -among other things - about your spells and/or combat arts. I'm still trying to figure that out. My Berserker is mostly using the highest-but-one level versions he has access to because he's upgraded them all to Master quality via the time-gated system.

Vet bonus 60%? Hmm, I guess 110 crafter must count now.

As you level to 110 you still get the lowest level Apprentice version of each new spell or CA gifted to you automatically, but to upgrade a Master of the previous version you need to reach Expert in the next. At lower levels you'd just have bought the Adepts off the broker or crafted the Experts yourself. That's still possible from 101st onwards but it becomes ferociously expensive. The drop rate on Adept spells is many orders of magnitude lower than you've been trained to expect. If I see one Adept drop in a session I'm amazed. The chances of getting one you need is too small to contemplate.

As for crafting Experts, I have a max-level sage who can do it for my casters but the number of rares required per spell and the cost of buying those rares makes it so off putting I haven't yet started. I'm also short a max-level Alchemist to make CAs for my Berserker. I used to rely on Mrs Bhagpuss for that.

All of which just gets you to Expert, at which point you can begin using the time-gated process to upgrade to Master, something that takes about six weeks. Per spell. Which itself is just the beginning. Next comes Grandmaster, Ancient and - I think but I'm not sure - Mythical. 

Even basic information on how all this works can be hard to find. Daybreak themselves recognized the potential for confusion a while back, when they added this very helpful guide to changes for returning players. I would absolutely advise anyone coming back to EQ2 after a lay-off to read through it carefully. It was written in May 2018 and it seems reasonably current but I fear some of the detail on Ascension may already be outdated.

Some of us love double XP!

Once you've gotten your head around the fact that your Adventuring class is no longer your prime concern and that your means of acquiring both XP and spell/CA upgrades have changed almost out of recognition , you can start looking at your gear. Unless you were a frenzied min-maxer you probably never bothered to pay attention to Infusing, let alone Reforging as you were leveling up. Well, you're going to have to start.

I still don't understand Reforging and I'm not sure how important it is in the scheme of things but I have come to terms with - and very much learned to value - Infusing. Infusing means boosting the stats on individual pieces of gear. It uses the Deity system (itself radically revamped recently and another entire system you need to learn) and runs either on Infusers you get as boss drops and quest rewards or on Platinum.

Pumping money into this slot machine is essential if you want to boost your character's effectiveness. I banged several thousand plat through it yesterday to add more than a million hit points to my Berserker's health pool, as well as pushing his Potency over 40k. You must repeat this process every time you change a piece of armor, too, because, unlike Augments, you can't take the upgrades out and re-use them.

Augmenting - that's another vital mechanic that just can't be ignored any more when you hit 100 although at least the way they work doesn't change - much. Keeping your gear as close to fully augmented as possible is another essential aspect of being max level. So is leveling up and gearing your Mercenary. So is keeping your Familiar maxed. And as of Chaos Descending we have levels and gear for our mounts, too. And I haven't even mentioned Fervor and Resolve...

On it goes. And on and on. If you play solo it's maybe not utterly impossible to ignore most of this and bumble along as if the old ways still applied but whether you can do that and still have fun, I'm not so sure. If you adapt and change then the newer content becomes as easy and genuinely "casual" as the lower but if you don't then it can feel like running face-first into a brick wall.

Don't worry about me. I'll just sit this one out.

As I said, if you want, you could familiarize yourself  with many of these processes and mechanisms as you level up. You probably should, since there's one hell of a lot to take in all at once if you leave it until you have no choice. Given that every expansion now comes with a Level Boost token, however, plenty of people are going to find themselves starting cold on a new character, even assuming they're current players who know the ropes.

How appealing a prospect this is will depend. It must be very tough on genuine new players and returning prodigals alike, but some people are going to love the complexity. There's a demographic that plays games mainly to learn the systems. They should be in clover.

For people who just want to log in and kill stuff, though, I'm not sure I could recommend starting at the top by buying the expansion and triggering the boost. It's attractive to be where the crowd is and you might well feel you're missing out down in the lonely lower levels, but if its the traditional MMORPG experience you're looking for, that's where you'll find it. EQ2's endgame, even the solo, supposedly casual endgame, is something else entirely.

All of which brings me back to the question: just who is a Double XP event that only applies to leveling modes really aimed at? And, perhaps even more puzzlingly, if you're going to have a Double XP event, why not tell people about it? I can't see any sign of an announcement either on the EQ2 Community News page or on the Launcher. Even google can't find a single mention. If that one person hadn't spoken up in chat I'd never have known.

It does potentially change my plans. I might concentrate on leveling a couple of my 100s to 110. Or I might wake up some lower levels, just to watch them knock off a dozen levels in a session. That's always fun.

How long this mysterious event is going to last I have no idea. I don't even know when it started. There's a patch today - there's a patch every Tuesday - so it might be gone when the servers come up. Or it might be with us through the coming holiday weekend. I suppose it might even be permanent...

Get it while it lasts, that's my advice. Unless your on your Level 110, in which case don't bother!

In My Element : EQ2

I count myself lucky, growing up in a culture that worships irony as a god. I've have never had much difficulty holding two contradictory ideas in my head at the same time.

It seems quite normal to me and it's a skill that comes in very handy at times. With the ink scarcely dry on my last post, the one with all the entitled whining about the formulaic nature of current-day GW2, here I am again, posting in praise of something equally predictable, happening in another MMO.

The way that I found out about the upcoming EQ2 expansion and the associated event came with ironic overtones of its own. Massively OP reported it ( not once but twice), both times off the back of tips from Wilhelm at TAGN. That made me wonder about a couple of things.

How come a website like MassivelyOP, which exists primarily to recycle puff pieces from MMORPG comany PR departments, needs to be informed by a reader about the official announcement of a new expansion for a well-known game that they cover regularly? Do DBG not send out press releases any more? Or is MassivelyOP no longer on their mailing list?

Maybe it's just that no-one at M:OP has time to read them. We're all busy these days and I imagine Massively gets a lot of mail. Perhaps that's all it is; a simple oversight.

Or maybe they're having trouble with their feeds, like I seem to be. After all, how come Wilhelm, who rarely plays EQ2 these days, knows about these things before I do? Particularly since I have both EQ2Traders and the main EQ2 News from the official website in my Feedly?

You're a big man but you're out of shape.

I can at least answer that one. I just checked the RSS feeds and the EQ2 News one was dead. I fixed it and now it's fine so I should be as up to date on all things EQ2 as anyone from now on. Feedly claims there's nothing wrong with the EQ2Traders link so I guess I'll just have to keep a closer eye on it. Maybe I should add it to my Blog Roll. I use it far more than Feedly these days, anyway.

Sources nothwistanding, I do now know that there will be an expansion for EQ2 this November. Then again, contrary to Massively's suspicions, we did already know that. It was in a Producer's Letter sometime back in February. The thing we didn't know is that it will be called Chaos Descending. Odd name. Then again, we had Kunark Ascending a couple of years back and I guess what goes up must come down.

Other than the name, all we know so far is that we're staying in the Planes. In the last expansion, Planes of Prophecy, we visited the Planes of Magic, Disease and Innovation as well as dropping in on the gods Karana and Solusek Ro in their respective fortresses (Bastion of Thunder and Sol Ro's Tower).  We also got to spend time in what appeared to be the lobby to the Plane of Valor without ever setting foot in the plane itself.

Oh, and after we put Innoruuk back together we got to visit the Plane of Hate, too. Which was nice. Or rather it wasn't.

Can't say I didn't warn him.

None of those are actual elements, though. This time round we get to go to the proper Elemental Planes: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Or as we call them in Norrath, the Earthen Badlands, the Kingdom of Wind, the Burning Lands and the Unresting Waters.

And then there's the Great Library. Is that a Plane? Oh, wait, you don't think it might be... the Plane of Knowledge? Now that really would be some nostalgia, right there. I hope that's what it is.

At this point I was going to speculate on what the expansion might contain. There's an established pattern that goes back the best part of a decade to The Shadow Odyssey in 2008: one or two overland zones, a bunch of instanced dungeons, a couple of raids and a Signature Quest to take us through all of them. Then there are a few mechanical innovations (aka gimmicks) and a new gear tier.

Every two or three expansions brings a level cap increase. We had one last time so we won't be getting another. Indeed if, as is rumored, this is the final expansion for EQ2, we'll be staying at Level 110 for ever.

For the past few years we've also had a pre-expansion event and it's always been roughly the same. Something Strange starts to happen all over Norrath. A team of investigators, representing one of the many academies, colleges, churches or governments, sets out to get to the bottom of whatever's going on.

Hit things 'til they break? I can do that.

No matter which institution is in charge they always follow the same methodolgy:  bribe a bunch of adventurers with trinkets to go and kill anything that looks weird and bring it back in bits to be experimented on. This time the Strange Thing is raging elementals and the investigating authorities are the Mage Schools of Freeport and Qeynos.

I spent more than two hours helping Freeport’s Academy of Arcane Science this morning. The introduction to the event was even more perfunctory than usual and the quest itself took less than ten minutes, half of which was finding the main questgiver, who was hidden away in the sub-basement of the Academy in a room whose intentionally obscure access protocols reminded me what very different games MMOs were back when EQ2 was young.

This looks like a good spot, Hattie.

None of that mattered a jot when I got stuck into the gameplay. It's exactly what I want from an MMO. There are Elemental Tempests in over thirty of EQ2's open world zones, allowing characters of any level to join in. Each spawns a series of raging elementals, which you get to kill for pleasure and profit, before you deal with the Tempest itself.

The Elementals need to con at least green to your character so I went to the highest-level zone, Plane of Magic with my max-level Berserker. Even though most of the mobs are two-ups and flagged "Heroic", they turned out to be so weak I had trouble targeting them before my Mercenary finished them for me.

Got. Got. Got. Want!

I found a lovely spot on the East zone rim where there are four spawns in a row. The Tempests have a five minute respawn timer which was just about right for doing them continuously. All the elementals drop whatever any elemental might and the Tempest always drops one Elemental Storm Shred, the event currency.

There's also a collection which requires twelve body drops from the elementals. That was how I came to spend two hours there. Collections have that annoying diminsihing returns thing going on, where the more items you have, the harder it seems to be to get the ones you still need.

And of course it often is harder, because developers set the drop rates and they like to make some rarer than others. I set myself a limit of one hundred Shreds and when I hit that buffer I still had one spot in my collection unfilled.

I am very glad I stayed as long as I did because although I didn't know it at the time the rewards are fantastic. Not in the way the Days of Summer rewards are (those are very significant combat and progression upgrades for any casual or semi-casual player) but in the exact way GW2 rewards almost never manage to be.

Cool and refreshing!

EQ2Traders has a great gallery of the full list of things you can buy but even there the pictures don't do them justice. Lots of the house items have particle effects or moving parts and many of them just look beautiful.

The two outfits are truly splendid, with glorious elemental effects. I am going to get them for a few of my magical types - they do look very wizardly. And it goes without saying I have to have the kitten. Prices are extremely reasonable and at the rate I was getting the Shreds I foresee no problems in farming as many as I need. And enjoying it, too.

As the lead-up to the expansion continues we can look forward to the now-traditional Gear Up, Level Up event, intended "to help you get your characters ready" for the expansion. What with that and Yun Zi's help it does make me wonder just how tough the new zones and instances are going to be if we need all this gearing up before we even get there.

Whther my characters are ready or not, I definitely am. The simple fact is, I'm more energized and excited by this underwritten, under-resourced content,  predictable and formulaic as it undoubtedly is, than anything I know of coming down the pipe in GW2. It's not that content needs to be original or fresh or inspired - it just has to be what I want. And this is exactly what I want.

It's going to be very sad if this time next year I can't sit down and bash out a post about how much I'm looking forward to the next EQ2 expansion. That's very much been a theme of this blog almost since the beginning. Fingers crossed those rumors are wrong. Maintenance mode would be fine for GW2 but EQ2 can do so much better - and deserves to.

Here Comes Summer! : EQ2

Just a heads-up for anyone who may be currently subbed to EQ2 but not playing: don't miss the new Days of Summer event.

It arrived without much of a fanfare and I could easily have missed it if it hadn't been for the ever-alert Feldon at EQ2Wire. The official Daybreak announcement is here.

This isn't an event that you do for the fun of of it, although, like all EQ2 quests and events someone has taken the trouble to give it both context and content. I enjoyed doing the first one but enjoyment is the bonus.

What this is all about is catch-up. Even with max-level boosts and the like, the end game of EQ2 is stratospheric.

I play fairly regularly. I've completed the storyline of the current expansion and done a bit of grunt work to improve some of my gear beyond what that provides. As a solo player I'm happy with where I am but compared to anyone doing Heroic Dungeons regularly I'm a wet-behind-the-ears newbie and let's not even talk about raid-equipped...

And that's just on a single character. None of my several max level alts is even in anything like that good shape.

Yun Zi is here to fix all that. Or at least give you hope. Hope that you might be able to take the forthcoming expansion at a canter rather than a crawl.

The diffident panda has unlimited stocks of the kind of gear you'd get from doing Heroics or better.

They are free. The only "cost" is being flagged for a specific number of weeks of his quests.

He has sought-after adornments in the colors you can't easily get solo. He has armor and weapons better than I've been able to get from Public Quests (which themselves give better gear than the solo rewards from the last expansion).

He has boosts to Divine Potency (which I am guessing I should know what it is...) and to raise an Ascension Class to Level 5 from scratch (I'm still just short of Level 4 on the only one I've tried to level - I lost focus on that months back).

All this and more has clearly been added to his inventory in order to allow both returning players and casuals like me to bootstrap themselves to something like viability for the current expectations of Heroic content and to give us a fighting chance at what's coming later in the year.

Even if you don't need to upgrade your gear or you're not interested in being hardcore this is still an event you won't want to miss. Yun Zi has mounts, prestige houses and a large stock of decorating items. There's something here for all playstyles.

What's more, and what's unusual, if not unheard of in EQ2, doing the quests on one character opens up the rewards for every character on that account. This makes the whole event very attractive not only to laggards like me but to committed, regular players as well.

People have been complaining that the current direction of development has been hard on alts: this is a response to those complaints.

The event looks to have been constructed in such a way as to avoid grind of any kind. Not only is it once per account but the first week's quest, which I did last night, took me less than a quarter of an hour (following the wiki). If you remember the Bootstrutter quests from the original release, it's like that; all you need to do is visit some locations then come back and tell the panda what you saw.

I'd go so far as to suggest that even of you aren't currently subbed, this event might be worth resubbing for if you have any intention of playing EQ2 again in the next expansion cycle. For the price of a couple of months' All Access this is a bargain.

The event runs from Tuesday, August 1st, 12:01AM PT to Monday, October 2nd at 11:59PM PT and each new week should presumably begin with the regular Tuesday patch.

I'm going make sure I don't miss any of them. I just hope they're all as quick and easy as the first!

Project Patchwork Pegasus : EQ2

The change of name and management from SOE to DBG has brought a lot of changes to the two EverQuest titles but one thing that has continued unabated is the long-established predilection of Sony Online Entertainment for experimenting with variant rulesets. It's an approach to curating MMORPGs that I have always endorsed wholeheartedly. I've even suggested that for any MMO to have two servers running under the same ruleset is a wasted opportunity.

Over the years I've done my best to taste all the flavors but even with the greatest goodwill and enthusiasm there are only so many hours in the day and you can only play so many characters. When Holly Longdale announced in her Producer's Letter back in May that two new servers would soon be available I read the rulesets and decided that I'd probably pass on the offer this time around.

Neither of the new servers looked especially appealing. The Isle of Refuge server, whose unique selling point is that almost all items that are flagged "Heirloom" on regular servers will be freely tradeable, seemed to me to be a re-run of EverQuest's Firiona Vie server minus the awkward (and quickly abandoned) "roleplaying" rules.

I played on Firiona Vie when it launched and for a few weeks afterwards. It was a unique and surreal experience. The RP rules included severe language restrictions that meant even characters of the same alignment couldn't communicate - dwarves and elves and gnomes had no common language for example.

The first few days seemed to consist mainly of language parties, where groups of characters of different races would sit in circles and spam each other in /say with repeated text in their own language. That's how you learned a language in  Norrath in those days.

The fact that almost the first thing players attempted to do on the RP server was nullify the very restrictions that had been implemented to encourage roleplaying foretold the story of Firiona Vie's future. Within a short time the only aspect of the ruleset that mattered was the free trading of just about everything, which in turn led to FV's status as the RMT capital of Norrath.

I'd remembered that Firiona Vie later fell into severe decline but it seems that's not the case. If it ever happened that decline has been reversed. I mentioned my belief in a comment to Wilhelm, who observed that FV sits at "Medium" on DBG's server status page, a level that puts it well above most servers for population.

Since I have a level 22 ranger there I took the trouble to log in and check. Using the very reliable benchmarks of /who in Plane of Knowledge, and the Guild Lobby, number of people in General Chat and number of Bazaar traders, all data points that can easily be compared between servers, I find that FV does indeed have a considerably higher population than Luclin/Stromm, my main server these days.

So, reports of Firiona Vie's failure seem to be apocryphal and it makes a lot more sense than I thought to see EQ2 attempting to replicate its comparative good health. Still doesn't make me want to play under that ruleset. When Isle of Refuge went live at the end of June I declined to attend the party.

The other server, which launched a couple of weeks later, looked if anything even less appealing. The server name, Race To Trakanon, is self-explanatory. This is the first of what Holly Longdale suggests may be a series of "Event" servers.

The server runs until the specified event is achieved, in this case the killing of the dragon Trakanon. There are set markers for players to achieve, which provide a variety of material rewards if hit, but soon after the dragon dies the server closes. At that point players get a free character move to the regular ruleset server of their choice and the server re-opens with a new target event.

This seems to me to be a good idea in principle. Over the years the various "Progression" servers for both games have tended to be seen by certain players and guilds as competetive "race to the top" environments. That hasn't always played well with the wishes and desires of the players who were looking to recreate the original Norrathian experiences of the past, or just to play through older content at a reasonable pace with a decent population around them.

Although I approve of the concept of Event servers, which should help to serve the needs of those conflicting communities, as someone who already plays far too many characters in far too many MMOs, much though I love that new server smell, the idea of starting yet another character on a server that won't exist in three months didn't really seem to make much sense. I was going to give this one a pass as well. And then I saw the sweetener.

Like Telwyn I couldn't resist the lure of a free flying mount for every character on my account. That really is a proper incentive. The mount itself isn't just a pegasus, something I have never owned, but a rainbow-hued patchwork pegasus. The patchwork versions of creatures, which appeared a few years back as part of the Bristlebane Day festivities, have always been one of my favorite looks.

What's more, the bar for obtaining this highly-desirable mount has been set exceptionally low. All you need to do is get to Level 10. Even under the slower xp rates and restrictions of the RTT server, that's no more than a couple of decent sessions.

It's very smart marketing. The server requires an All Access account to play on, which effectively makes it a Subscription-only option. Chances are most people playing there right now already had such an account but each of these "AA Only" additions to the game takes it further in the direction DBG clearly intends to go - back to a Subscription service with a generous free trial.

I've spent several hours playing on RTT very happily. Very happily indeed, actually. I forgot just how much fun starting a genuine new character with no access to the accrued wealth of high levels on the same account can be.

Right before I began writing this post my ratonga bruiser dinged ten and the free mount was mine. I could stop there, mission achieved, but I'm not going to do that. I'm having far too much fun.

I chose to begin in Qeynos because even after all these years there's still a great deal of content in Queen Antonia Bayle's capital that I have never experienced. I could have written three more posts already on new quests, new instances and new events that I've found, all of which I've never seen before.

When the time comes for my new bruiser to move home I'll be excited all over again for whatever comes next but it's not the event for which the server is named that's doing it for me. I'll never see Trakanon fall, not unless I watch it on YouTube. No, it's that starting over yet again has made me realize just how much there is still to see even after a dozen years of heavy play. That's been the real "event" for me.

No Need To Be Crabby About It : GW2

It ended with a bang. After two hours of non-stop mayhem, the Ancient Karka slipped under the hitherto unseen lava, lurched back up like any good horror film baddie, then slumped over the lip of the pool, dead. And a massive chest appeared.

You should see the other guy

I wasn't expecting loot. During the two-hour event many people made jokes about what reward we might get for our many, many deaths. Diddly squat was the consensus, if we were lucky. In the end I got a couple of rares and a couple of exotics, one of which I could actually use, and everyone got a 20-slot bag (worth about $10 in real money) and a level 80 exotic jewellery item. Some folks even got Legendary Pre-Cursors and if you don't know what those are then bully for you.

But it's not about the loot, is it? No it isn't! That wasn't a rhetorical question! It's about the fun and the camaraderie and the being there. And weirdly, this time I can say that without irony. I did the entirety of Lost Shores Phase 3 on an Overflow server, where people come together who may never meet again and yet the whole two hours passed in excellent spirits.

If I hear one more crab cake joke...

Despite many setbacks there was a steady stream of hearty, good-natured, articulate banter. Much as happens on the Frontiers of WvW, leaders arose spontaneously to direct the efforts of the zerg and were heeded and after a great deal of struggle, at several points during which I found myself wondering if ArenaNet had thought of providing a Failure condition, we eventually prevailed.

Is this the line for JBoots?

All's well that ends well, then. Unless you were one of the unfortunates who disconnected before the chest dropped and couldn't get back in (the log-in servers seem to have died - I'm writing this now because when I took the ship back to Lion's Arch the game crashed and that appears to be my lot for the evening). Or who wasn't able to play at all for whatever real-life reason. Or who had so much lag it was impossible to do anything meaningful and gave up.

Clearly these events are problematic. The forums are mildly busy with discontent. It needs to be recognized that not everyone enjoyed themselves. I had a great time, though and map chat for the two hours the event took suggested a lot of other people did too. 

I thought you had the nails

On balance I thought Lost Shores got better stage by stage. Phase One was really very buggy indeed. It's probably fair to say that as far as the "quests" went more didn't work than did. There were patches and deadline extensions and a lot of scrabbling to try and get the loose ends tied. The invasion of Lion's Arch was fun but laggy. I expected the Karka to win and take over the city for a day or two so I also found it somewhat anti-climactic when we ousted them quite easily.

Phase two was late starting, much shorter, a lot less laggy, largely bug-free and over in about three-quarters of an hour. The introductory re-invasion didn't even happen on the Overflow server I was on. The ship just appeared and off we went. The core of the event was a chain similar to those we've seen many times before. Good fun but nothing amazing.

Phase Three was the "multi-hour" climax. It qualified, on the smallest possible value of "multi", finishing in about 130 minutes. I almost missed the beginning, having to run one and a half times around the entire island before I found the Lionguard Detonation Team but from then on it was action all the way as we went up and down the spiral ramps of the Karka hive laying bombs and harried the Ancient Karka hither and yon  across the salt flats.

Last thing crabmeat needs is more salt

I think we were all expecting the finale to be the exploding of the charges we'd set and the collapse of the mountain, which would have been truly spectacular. In the end I didn't notice the detonation at all, if it even happened, and the event ended with the Ancient Karka trapped at the bottom of the Hive succumbing to our withering fire.

Success? Success??

Was it a success? Well, I enjoyed it. I'd do it again, or another like it. For me, the fact that it was a one-time event made it worthwhile. It felt like an event in the non-gaming sense of the word. I was glad to have been there and done that. If it was going to happen every three hours for the next few days then I might well not have bothered with it. Oh alright, I probably would. But I'd have been sighing the while.

Will ArenaNet stick to their guns and carry on pumping out content that vanishes into the aether of memory after a single outing? I hope so. They seem surprisingly prone to vacillation right now, so I'm less confident of their stubbornness than I was, but yes, I do hope they keep it up. It may be wasteful and controversial and it may provoke discontent but I know that if I'm playing another game and they announce something like this again, I'll be back.

Candy Cornucopia : GW2

I was mildly annoyed when I found out that the Guild Wars 2 Halloween event was scheduled to start on the very day we flew to Barcelona for a week. After a day' spent dancing with the Mad King I'm beginning to think it was lucky timing.

Oh, I'd have liked to have seen the Mad King himself burst out of the fountain in Lion's Arch. That must have been spectacular. I just hope someone's got the blueprints to put that statue back together. One of my favorite places to hang out, that was.

The decorations are jolly good. Of course, Halloween decorations are all much of a muchness but these are mucher than most. The spooky lighting effects are efficiently atmospheric and the hanging bats that furl and unfurl their wings made me smile. Most of the work seems to have gone into Lion's Arch but there was a camp in Plains of Ashford that, I think, appears when certain events are completed and no doubt there are others. Even the Mists have been decorated, which struck me as beyond the call of duty.

As for the content, variable would be a diplomatic way of putting it. I spent an hour or so doing the first six stages of the Scavenger Hunt, which was moderately entertaining. It wouldn't have been much fun without the walkthrough  I had up, but then what scavenger hunt is? The Mad King appears to have been born that way, judging by the tales told by the many, many ghosts his increasingly psychotic childhood outbursts left behind.

It's true that one shouldn't do these things for the reward, but it has to be said that the reward when it came was paltry in the extreme. When I realized there were another six volumes to collect I decided I knew as much about the Rabid Royal as I cared to and left it at that.

The Lunatic Inquisition looked like a lot more fun. It wasn't. It was okay, if confusing. It's basically Sardines with added violence. Each thirteen-minute match seemed to comprise about five minutes of action at best, with the bulk of the time spent with almost everyone converted into Lunatics chasing round and round the map looking for the last Villager. Maybe there were just some good hiders on when I popped in.

Reaper's Rumble was better, in that it was a lot easier to follow and there were actual fights. Made me nostalgic for Rift's Warfronts or EQ2's Battlegrounds. Ah, Rift and EQ2. The former has Events down to an art and the latter has enough Halloween content to launch an entire F2P title. Maybe I'm spoiled after those, and this is GW2's first ever holiday event after all, but the comparisons don't favor the newcomer.

It's not that there isn't plenty going on. There are new, easy recipes that make food and potions (two things I never remember to use and which I really don't have the bag space to carry). There are fantastically demanding recipes that make skins for weapons, which you'd probably need to be as mad as the King to attempt, although you can get the same looks on a four-hour fade from Merchants for your Candy Corn.

Candy Corn is the currency du jour. You can mine it from nodes that look quite disturbing. Or you can just buy it in vast quantities from the Trading Post from people with more time and patience than you. Going rate as I write is 7c per corn. I bought 150 to finish my Monthly, where the mysterious ??? has now resolved itself to a frankly banal demand that we gorge ourselves silly on the sugary stuff.

Pumpkin Carving is another activity on offer. I do like the frenzied animation that goes along with it. Whether I'll get a hundred and fifty of the things chipped out in  two days I doubt. There are the doors that pop up inviting you to Trick or Treat and then there's a dungeon, which I haven't entered and jumping puzzles, which sound hellish. The little jumper right outside the bank in Lion's Arch nearly drove me demented so I'll not be trying the others. I did eventually manage to jump into the pot and get spat out as a spider. Once was enough.

Goodie bags drop passably frequently. So far all I've had out of mine is yet more corn and a smattering of food. Whether they can cough up anything worthwhile I'm not sure. Possibly there's a tiny chance one of the many new Holiday items from the Gem Store might fall out. That's where a lot of the supposedly interesting stuff is - costumes, pets, skins and the like. None of it actually interests me and ArenaNet have to make money, so good luck to them. I did take the free pair of devil horns, which look quite debonaire on an Asura.


That's my first impression. There's probably lots more going on that I have yet to discover. I'm glad it's all going to be over in a couple of days and I'm not at all sorry to have come late to this party. I have mixed feeling about holiday events in general and this one has a particularly enervating edge.

I just hope they put that fountain back the way it was.

Just Popped In For A Pumpkin: Rift

Finding it hard to peel myself away from GW2 at the moment, not to mention that I'll have less time than usual to play over the next two or three weeks. Frustrating in a way because there's just so much going on. Feast is better than famine though, so let's hear no complaints.

On the subject of feasts, there's some kind of Harvest Festival going on in Telara right now. Thanks to the excellent RiftLite I was able to drop in and say hello to my old pal Atrophinius. He's an odd duck and his Plane of Life is an odd pond. We never seem to be quite as "at war" with the Plane of Life as we are with the others, what with druids having Fairy pets and old Atrophinius here turning up every so often with a few barrels of mead.

This time he had me grabbing pumpkins to decorate his little patch of Faeland. I found mine in a Water rift. Hydroponics reaches Telara.


On the far side of Silverwood, which always seems like it half belongs in the Plane of Life anyway, I found the way into what I took to be a Sliver. Can't say for sure - never been in one before. Lots of vendors setting up in there, plenty of things to do, pests to kill and so forth. If only I had time to help out, over there's just some of what I could have won. >>>

On the way I bumped in some treants. It's been a while, but I don't remember them looking quite like this. Their new model or my poor memory? Both, most likely.

I'm always surprised by how gorgeous Telara looks. It stacks up well even against GW2. The gritty, digital feel is quite pleasantly abrasive after the painterly washes of Tyria. I'm very curious to see what the new continents look like.

There's a great offer coming up - unrestricted free access to Rift for four days from November 7th to 11th for anyone who ever had a subscription. Better still, it ties in with the big Storm Legion lead-up event. Definitely going to clear time in my busy MMO calendar for that.

Whether I can hold out until the New Year before buying the expansion we shall see. I wouldn't go betting the farm. Not even the Panda Farm. Especially not after this...